“Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words” reflection 4 – music writing, empathy and differentiation
Writing a book about a musician (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, Sept. 2024) always entails a two-to-three year period immersing myself in that person’s music, ways of thinking, experiences, and perspectives. As in the past, with Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Paul Winter, and others, this has once again been my experience with Pat Metheny, starting in January 2020. This kind of experience has always been a great source of learning on many levels – musical, conceptual, cultural, and other – as it has most certainly been once again this round.
Two things have made my experience writing about Pat Metheny different from the others:
First, my focus this time has been finely tuned to one musician rather than to a musician’s band (as with Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi Quintet/Sextet/Octet, the Miles Davis “Lost” Quintet, and to some degree the Paul Winter Consort), nor has it dealt heavily with a cluster of intersecting circles of musicians (as with the groups I write about in the Miles Davis book – Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea and Circle, Anthony Braxton, MEV, Revolutionary Ensemble, 19th Street Loft, and others). I do write about Pat Metheny in the context of Gary Burton and Steve Swallow, the Pat Metheny Group, the quartet that recorded “From This Place,” the changing cluster of “Side Eye” musicians, and others. I also home in on the personal perspectives of two musicians who have worked with Metheny for years (Steve Rodby and Antonio Sanchez) and of Pat Metheny’s current guitar tech (Andre Cholmondeley).
Second, Pat Metheny is the first musician I’ve written about who is of my own generation (born six months apart), whose influences in some important ways overlap with my own, and whose musical perspectives, like mine, cross aesthetic, technological and other perceived boundaries. Each of us in our own ways pushes back against expectations that musicians should stay in their lane (“jazz” musicians shouldn’t play “pop” music, “acoustic” musicians shouldn’t play “electronic” music, “classical” musicians shouldn’t do anything else… and vice versa). This is in many ways generational because for an increasing number of younger musicians (Tyshawn Sorey and Esperanza Spalding come to mind), a far broader “playing field” is becoming normalized. For Pat Metheny, the Beatles weren’t more or less important than Wes Montgomery, while Gary Burton and Steve Swallow bridged the two. For me, Jefferson Airplane wasn’t more or less important than Cecil Taylor, while Frank Zappa bridged the two.
Being a musician is so embedded within my sense of self (I do not claim to be unique in this respect) that prose writing bridging empathetic understanding and scholarly distance is at the core of my scholarly skillset. Crucial to my ability to write about musicians is noticing where my subject’s perspectives align with my own and discerning with clarity where they do not. Yet this is not a static binary distinction since I can find commonality in purpose or conception with another musician while recognizing that we may each arrive in that place from very different trajectories and aim for different artistic ends. Alternately, the trajectory may be similar while the musical outcome is different. Achieving clarity of understanding thus involves repeatedly shifting from identification to differentiation, toggling back and forth between the two. At times this can be confusing, while ultimately the result brings forth deeper understanding.
This alternation of identification and differentiation is really what allows me to understand another musician. I learn about other musicians by playing their music – and – listening to them play their music, and dialoging with them. The sum of all these experiences, and others, serves as a bouncing board (and mirror) that helps me understand how I personally understand the music as if it were my own – and with that I am able to perceive the musician’s work with scholarly distance.
While finding points of musical commonality with Pat Metheny has been crucial to my ability to write about his work, equally important has been identifying the ways we differ. Here’s one example. Pat Metheny – a guitarist – composes primarily at a keyboard instrument rather than on guitar. I on the other hand – a keyboardist – compose almost exclusively at the keyboard no matter what instrument I’m writing for. Pat has commented that the design of the guitar and the physicality of navigating a guitar doesn’t substantially influence his composing. For me, the process is quite different.
A blog post I published on August 18, 2020 collected several of my previous reflections about the relationship between physicality and embodiment, and musical expression. You can read these here:
In a post dated August 4, 2015 I wrote: “We improvisers prefer to consider what we do as intentional translations of thoughts into sounds. And there is something to that…”
What I’ve learned about Pat Metheny is that this description more or less defines how he composes. I then add in the blog- and this is as true of Metheny as it is of me – “Honestly, I think that much of what we improvisers do is unconscious.” Pat Metheny conceptualizes music mentally and emotionally, conscious of harmonic and pitch relations, melodic shape, long arcs of phrasing and melody… And of course while improvising, this cognition helps shape how he plays, more than muscle memory, favorite turns of phrase, habits… (note that others disagree with me on this point) even while maintaining an often identifiable sound and aesthetic. I am of course over simplify to make a point.
For me, the physicality of my relationship with the piano dates back to my earliest experiences and it hasn’t notably changed. I am sufficiently knowledgeable about harmonic and pitch relations, repertoire and a range of musical approaches, so while I may not be actively thinking about them, these are always present somewhere in my mind (this is of course true of many experienced improvisers, including Pat Metheny). But for me, the conceptual or cognitive side of composition isn’t always at the core of inspiration or initiation for my composing. The feel of the keyboard and my engagement with it is in many ways my North Star for musical “thinking,” whether the task is composing or improvising (and what Pat Metheny observes about himself is true of me too – I paraphrase here – “composing and improvising are similar endeavors at very different temperatures”) The processes that drive how each of these unfold for Metheny and I differ.
My 2015 blog post continues: “… Among the modes of improvisatory cognition is muscle memory. Some may define this as ‘habit,’ and sometimes it is. But there’s an element to playing, at least for me, that is substantially physical. It arises in the ways we shape or move our fingers, our lips, mouths, feet, doing so in ways that our body knows are right. This isn’t necessarily the same thing as habit; it is simply another way of intuiting and knowing. I find that what I play is more often what my body wants to do than is usually acknowledged by musicians (including me)… Placing trust in my fingers and arms does not come easily since I was rigorously trained to trust only in sheet music. So much so, that it was hard for me to even trust my memorization of sheet music. Only in mid-adulthood did I rediscover my early childhood free abandon at the keyboard, before ever starting lessons… One of the gifts I discover when trusting my body’s judgment is that I allow great latitude to making mistakes.”
I’ll add that the directions my compositional process heads – following the initial phase of inspiration and gathering of materials – can be far more cognitive than I’m stating. Such is the nature of musical form, however open, and how one can employ it to give shape to musical ideas as these unfold in time. It is also true that certain compositional influences, particularly Wayne Shorter and Johann Sebastian Bach form a kind of musical backdrop that influences what my hands “like” to do and how I mediate between the physical and cognitive aspects of my musicianship. And of course, when I’m playing with others, close listening, response, and guiding are important drivers of what I play.
As the production of my new book heads to its conclusion, culminating in a September 2024 publication date, so does my own musical productivity continue to evolve. The process of composing and recording this past year (in fact I recently released a new album) cannot but be in some form of dialog with my thinking about Pat Metheny. This doesn’t mean that I’ve been composing music that sounds like his music, but maybe it subtly responds to aspects of his musical thinking that have been impacted by the process of writing. I’ve certainly learned a lot from the experience. I’ve certainly emerged musically changed in subtle ways as a consequence of each sustained writing project I’ve undertaken. I look forward to consolidating what I’ve learned musically from this one, just as I anticipate the arrival of the published book and its journey in the hands of readers.
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